William Blake Ancient of days.

This is an image of Urizen who is the embodiment of conventional reason in the Mythology of William Blake, and is used to convey an example of technocratic repression, and is an important character in Blake’s opposition to a politic of empiricism and industrial power.

Will write more about William Blake later as am studying his work and considering his political ideology which existed in opposition to figures such as Lock and Newton .

Reflections on Mid-point review.

Found the mid point review encouraging. + it was fantastic to finally show some work in a critical environment

The main thing I took from the, discussion overall, was a sense that my ideas are starting to take form, and the most encouraging thing was the sense that my research interests are starting to become evident within in my work, which is a very nice feeling.
Apart from this I understand that my work could be even more focused, and that I need to start refining my projects into more sophisticated, meticulous products. The most profound criticisms were that my work, particularly Metro-Nome were in some respects seen as ‘a piss take’, or a ‘childish poke’, in other words slightly juvenile and unrefined. Very grateful for these points in particular because, I feel they confirm what I already felt which was that I need to focus and work more, and to craft my pieces more meticulously, I think this will eliminate these kind if reactions. However I do feel my work in general is playful and would like to be perceived as such, fun?. Though obviously the term ‘Childish Poke’ is entirely negative and not what I want to communicate so have to work more on getting the balance right. I generally though I feel encouraged by the proceedings of the mid point review and know that my work was received well and praised in many ways also, and that people were interested by the themes, ideas and methods that I am exploring. I feel both encouraged and motivated by the discussions in general.

It is always difficult to notate such a big discussion so I decided to record just the Key words from what was being discussed, I will list these now, and also use them as tags.
Interested to see what this does to the tag cloud on my blog.

Key words from mid point review in (un-ordered)

Performance Piece, Chuck Norris, Mid-point-review, Documentation of a performance, Andy Warhol, Heart of the City, Childish Poke, Greenwich, Non-Metronymic, How to Capture Performance, Containers, Anecdote, Heartbeat, Pyramid, Glowing, Introduction, Edge of the Abyss, Light in the Sea, Education, Walking, Abstract, Mythology, Meditation, Repetition, Multiple Buildings, Getting closer to something unreachable, Kenneth Anger, Heart, Tour Guide, Mars, Beats, Rhythms, Interpretations, Transformations, Taking the Piss, Expansible, A beam across time, Simplicity, Metronome, Unit, Law, Flashing, Otherness, Window, Faces, Drama, Motorway, Iain Sinclair, Failed Bypass, Disembodiment, Project as a whole, Mimicry, Sound, Claire Bishop participation, Relation Aesthetics.

Magic is Technology’s unconscious

The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realisation of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its’ own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super nature, and the more intently we probe it’s mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural. Pg 48 TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Introduction; TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information

‘My Topic my seem rather obscure at first, for common sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with technology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter of Rock ‘em Sock’em robots. Historians and sociologists inform us that the west’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations and apocalyptic visions crashed on the shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, sceptical enquiry and material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations that form the foundation of the modern world.’

pg 5

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

The Social Construct and Technomysticism

By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, of what we now increasingly think of as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Historically the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualised social narratives of mythology., the ethical inwardness of the ‘religions of the book’, and the increasingly rationalised modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked the their notions and symbols in the world around them, using archetecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual, – and often whatever media they could get their hands on .
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the World of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums ‘channel spiritual information‘, the ever shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
p g 8

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Embalming Ritual – Transfiguration

”The Goal of the embalming ritual is a state of unity. ‘

‘Just as the magic of writing is able to capture a make visible a meaning, so to is the person captured and made visible as a symbolic form or hieroglyph in the mummy. ‘

‘A function of these transfiguring recitations is to collect, so to speak the limbs of the body, imagined as being scattered, into a text which it as a new. Such descriptions normally list the individual body parts from top to bottom, begining with the head and equate them with deities, we would like to look at a closer example of this form it is part of a liturgy for the dead of the middle kingdom (19th century B.C) entitled ‘Uniting the Limbs of a transfigured one for him in the Necropolis’.

It contains the following text.

you have taken shape by being the entirety of all the gods;

Your Head is Re 

Your face is Upeat

Your noise is Jackal (Anubis)

etc. ”

Pg: 54.
Remembering the Body.
By A. Assmann (Author), J. Assmann (Author), G. Brandstetter (Author, Editor), et al (Author), H. Volckers(Editor)

Publisher: Hatje Cantz (Jun 2000)

William Blake Ancient of days

This is an image of Urizen who is the embodiment of conventional reason in the Mythology of William Blake,  and is used to convey an example of technocratic repression,  and is an important character in Blake’s opposition to a politic of empiricism and industrial power.

Will write more about William Blake later as am studying his work and considering his political ideology which existed in opposition to figures such as Lock and Newton .